Multicolumn support

Finally, I glad to announce that multicolumn support was added to UV Outliner!

UV Outliner 1.5 becomes the first modern single pane outliner for Windows with multiple column support in the world ;-).

This version currently does not support “data types” in columns, but they will be supported very soon.

A lot of headaches with multicolumn implementation were related to supporting export to the .rtf format. Unfortunately, due to the limitation of the RTF format, there still some problems in certain circumstances with the generated multicolumn .rtf file.

7 Responses

Very impressive – it’s good to see somebody hard at work who’s clearly been inspired by the Mac’s OmniOutliner, but is keeping things lean and mean in Windows. In particular, congratulations on the multiple columns (especially offering rich text) – we’ll be testing this out and let you know how we get on.

You’re starting to move toward what we had 20 years ago with Grandview under MS-DOS. I hope that you’re aware of that app and its features–I’ve been looking for a Grandview replacement (for Windows) for the past 15 years, and to date nothing has come remotely close. Adding columns is a big step in the right direction!

FYI, if you’ve never seen Grandview, I’d be glad to send you some info on it–just contact me via email.

In case you didn’t pick up the implication, my value for an outliner is how useful it is as a writer’s aid, rather than its functionality as a full-featured PIM. I used Ecco Pro in the late 90s as a project management tool (it was great for managing multiple simple projects), but it wasn’t so good as a writer’s tool.

If you choose to aim at a particular market, keep in mind that there are dozens of PIMs and project managers for Windows out there, but no writer’s tool like GrandView.

Are there any updates?
Or is this project dead?
No updates since january let it seem to be a dead project…
I would have loved a single pane outliner for windows with some of the features of OmniOutliner. The beginning seemed promising.

Hello Fedir —
Just found your outliner, and I’m very impressed. I hope the project is *still* not dead? Unicode, columns, and CLEAN — excellent. I’ve been looking for a research / writing tool. Up until now, I’ve been using MSWord “outline” view. YUK! It’s clunky, quirky, and definitely not clean.

You asked Andre for suggestions / features — here are two reasons I’ve (unfortunately) had to stick with MS Word:

1. It’s the only “single pane” outline tool I’ve found that lets me paste images into the outline. Often, in my research and testing, I have a jpeg (a photo, or a screenshot, etc) that is important to include. I really need a *single* tool where I can store all of my data. I see that your tool allows one to paste in images(!!!), but when I store and re-open my outline, the file seems to get corrupted, and crash. Can this be fixed? It would make UV Outliner *VERY* unique and powerful.

2. “Bundling” links: I’ve written a VBasic macro for MS Word that looks through my word document, finds all of my hyperlinked documents, and gather up all of the target-files into a single folder, then updates the hyperlinks. This allows me to quickly make my outline completely “portable,” with all of the associated link-targets in one location. I can then burn it to CD, and use my outline as an index to all of the associated files. Do you think you could make this happen, or open up an API of some kind? (I’d be happy to show you more of what I did — not fancy, but it works).

3. (the first two were actual feature requests — this is more of a comment): If I’m writing a report, I need full word-processing capabilities. So the more that can be done to make the exporting to MS Word, the better. This is a lower priority.

Hope you are still working on this project, and that my suggestions make sense. Please let me know!
–Will